Saturday, July 28

Geek

RSS And All That

Recently Steven had a comment that was held for moderation (it had a junk score between 5 and 10).  He didn't know this, because Minx doesn't notify the blogger when new comments arrive.  It doesn't do that because I really don't want the server sending out thousands, and eventually perhaps millions, of emails every day.

But bloggers still need to know when new comments arrive.

One thing Minx can do is generate an RSS feed for any folder.  There's a folder at yourblog:/edit/comment that presents a list of comments, and an RSS feed of that would give you a feed of all new comments as they arrive.  Perfect!

Except... That folder is private, so you have to log in to read it.  This seems to be impossible under Thunderbird, which is what I use for my RSS feeds.  It works under Firefox, but the Firefox RSS reader is unuseable for this task.

So the question is, do people think this functionality is a good idea?  I like it because can easily be extended to other things, providing you with a feed of everything that goes on on your blog without the server having to grind through the data all the time.

And what feed readers do you use?  Do they support cookies?

I'm considering a little desktop app to help manage this sort of thing, but that's months away, and will probably be Windows-only (though the API will be open) so I'm looking for something I can do in the meantime.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:45 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 I noticed that you allow me to set the "hold it" and "junk it" thresholds. They default to 5 and 10 respectively, but I realized that if I set them to the same thing then it deactivates the "hold it" feature for my particular blog.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, July 29 2007 05:01 AM (+rSRq)

2 I'm using Wizz RSS feeder.  Free, basic, stable and I like it.  Frequent updates too.

Posted by: RocketJones at Sunday, July 29 2007 05:20 AM (7lxqj)

3
I noticed that you allow me to set the "hold it" and "junk it" thresholds. They default to 5 and 10 respectively, but I realized that if I set them to the same thing then it deactivates the "hold it" feature for my particular blog.
Yep, that would work.

Though right now I can't remember if I finished testing that feature.  In fact, I have a very strong suspicion that at least the lower threshold is still hard-coded in some places.  I think if you set the upper threshold to 5, though, it will do just what you're after.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 29 2007 06:37 AM (PiXy!)

4 Thanks Ted.

I've been doing a bit of reading on the state of RSS, and it looks kind of workable, but I'll need to add an alternate authentication method to Minx first.

The other thing that would do the job is NNTP.  I'm planning an NNTP interface to Minx at some point, but that's probably not going to be soon either.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 29 2007 06:39 AM (PiXy!)

5 I use bloglines because I've been too lazy to look for anything else.  If there's one that's good and works with minx - I'll be happy to use it. 

Posted by: Teresa at Monday, July 30 2007 02:31 PM (gsbs5)

6 Just to make sure no-one's confused - any reader will work with Minx for normal feeds.  It's only the private feeds that are an issue.

There is a standard for private feeds, but Minx doesn't support that yet, so it looks like I'll have to do that first.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 30 2007 06:09 PM (PiXy!)

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